First off I want to say that I was all kinds of excited for the iTunes movie rentals and yesterday I decided to finally rent a movie through it, there weren’t very many rentable movies that I haven’t seen (and that I was willing to see) so I decided on “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer” and I have not yet watched the movie. Why haven’t I watched it? you might ask, well it’s because the AppleTV doesn’t work with rented movies yet.
I guess maybe I should have guessed that since the new firmware for the AppleTV won’t be coming out for another couple of weeks but come on now! that means I’m going to have to wait that long until I watch the movie, I love my iPhone but I’m not going to watch an hour and a half long movie on a 3.5″ screen!
The next thing that bothers me, the 5G iPod doesn’t play the rented movies. I understand that Steve Jobs said that only current generation iPods would work with it but I figured if I downloaded a utility like Floola (which allows you to manage videos and music on your iPod without iTunes) than at least I could get the movie on the iPod and maybe it would play.
I was able to get the movie on the iPod by dragging the video file into the Floola window and Floola sent the video to my iPod promptly, the video was listed in the movie section but it wouldn’t play, at all, I would just get a black screen. (My reason for trying it on my iPod is because I have the AV cable and figured if I could get it running than at least I could watch it on my TV).
Anyway so besides me having to wait two weeks to watch this movie I’m super happy with it, the download was quick and I like the new section added to my library (it looks really nice). The lack of 5G iPod support won’t kill the service for me, I don’t use that iPod to watch video that often anyway, but it would have been nice to be able to take the video with me (without having to buy a $49 cable).